BOOK REVIEWS

Anthony Davis. Dire Straits. The Dilemmas of a Fishery: The Case of Digby Neck and the Islands. St. John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1991. xvi + 111 pp., figures, maps, photographs, tables, appendix, notes. $24.95, paper; ISBN 0-919666-64-7.

Davis describes the declining ability of in-shore hook-and-line fishermen to compete with trawlers in the years between 1945 and 1982. In the period studied, the government and fish plant owners actively promoted the trawlers. The economic rationale for this policy was that fish plant owners were in need of stable supplies, which only trawlers could ensure, if they were to compete on the fresh fish market in the United States.

Davis' argument is strikingly akin to complaints raised by fishermen for cen-turies against any new technology that they did not themselves possess. Yet Davis does not compare his findings with data from other relevant fisheries. Thus, his argument is curiously parochial for all its anthropo-logical jargon. Published in 1991 it is strange that Davis has not updated the text.

By way of conclusion, Davis proposes the "elimination of the use of non-selective, mobile fishing technologies such as otter trawls and seine nets...throughout Atlantic Canada." He argues that these technologies have resulted in the near destruction of fish stocks. He also believes that the trawl doors, bottom lines and rollers destroy marine resource habitats by tearing up the ocean floor. The government should buy

out the trawlers and finance a refitting pro-gramme. Davis hopes that reduced catches will be compensated by better prices for higher quality. Increased unemployment for fish-plant workers should be compensated by the dole. In the long term Davis hopes that diversification of the products will provide more stable, higher-income jobs. Finally, management of the fish stocks should be left to the fishers themselves.

Davis does not refer to any literature in support of his accusations and beliefs. Indeed, research undertaken at the Danish Institute of Fishery Technology does not validate his view. Fifty years of intensive trawling in the North Sea have not ruined the ocean floor. Nor does he discuss how the industry would have fared, had his policy been effected. Indeed I would have liked a broader discussion of the relation between fishery policy and social policy, taking into account recent experiences. Surely fishery policy alone is unlikely to create sufficient jobs for the population of Atlantic Canada or anywhere else, when the trend of the industry is to rationalize and lay off the workforce. That process is inherent whether we leave the industry to itself or we engage in large-scale social engineering on the path Davis proposes.

Davis perceives that the first opponents to his scheme would be the fishers them-selves. Their "myopic views" based on "individualistic utilitarian rationality" might undermine the best "interests of fishers, fish processors, fish plant workers and the government alike." Like so many Utopian

43

44 The Northern Mariner

social engineers before him, Davis aspires to create the best of all worlds, only to realize that people do not want what he knows is best for them.

Poul Holm Esbjerg, Denmark

Gerald L. Pocius. A Place to Belong: Com-munity Order and Everyday Space in Cal-vert, Newfoundland. Athens, GA: The Uni-versity of Georgia Press; Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1991. xx + 350 pp., maps, photographs, tables, illustrations, bibliography, index. Cdn $44.95, cloth; ISBN 0-7735-0805-8.

The six thousand mile coastline of the island of Newfoundland constitutes an ecotone that supported over 1300 commun-ities (especially fishing settlements or "outports") in the late nineteenth century. Most of the oldest outports are situated along the East Coast and Avalon Peninsula. Calvert, the subject of this superb interdis-ciplinary community study, is locally renowned, along with Ferryland, as the site of George Calvert's (later Lord Baltimore) short-lived attempt to establish a plantation in the early seventeenth century.

But Pocius does not dwell on the dis-tant past. Combining techniques and in-sights derived from folklore, cultural and historical geography, ethnohistory and ethnography, he provides readers with a detailed portrait of everyday life in Calvert in the twentieth century. Although a folk-lorist specializing in material culture, Pocius goes beyond a study of things and grapples with various intangible aspects of outport subculture. His specific concern is the use of space: how residents socially construct the spaces in which they live. Since they still tend to share common spaces, including some of the means of

production, he delves into the social infra-structure of the community.

Replete with numerous black and white photos, the 26 x 21 cm. book is divided into three parts: the social, cultural and historical context; technology, subsis-tence production, and the sociocultural landscape (including gender consider-ations); and settlement patterns, housing (both interiors and exteriors) and a debate on the dichotomy between tradition and modernity.

Calvert is a small, close-knit cooper-ative inshore cod fishing community, largely of Irish Catholic extraction. Pocius was hospitably accepted and responds by citing his informants by name, quoting them ex-tensively and, through his photos, showing them at work and at home. He concludes that residents are not materialistic and that the incorporation of modern goods and technology does not mean that Calvert is in transition or modernizing. He found instead that new things are often used in socially old ways. The essence of commun-ity life in Calvert is "sharing," especially the resources of the land and sea.

Thomas F. Nemec St. John's, Newfoundland

Poul Holm. Kystfolk. Kontakter og sam-menhaenge over Kattegat og Skagerrak ca. 1550-1914. Esbjerg, DK Fiskeri-og Sofarts-museet, 1991 [Fiskeri & Sofartsmuseet, Tarphagevej, DK-6700 Esbjerg, Denmark]. 348 pp., photographs, figures, maps, tables, bibliography, index, English summary. DKr 228, cloth; ISBN 87-87453-525.

Coastal People. Contacts across the Cattegat and Skagerrak, c. 1550-1914 is the title of this thesis from the University of Aarhus, which includes a comprehensive summary in English. Poul Holm's aim is to describe

Book Reviews 45

the coastal cultures of southern Norway, western Sweden, and northern Denmark. These regions all face the same waters, the Cattegat and the Skagerrak. Holm exam-ines changing regional adaptations and contacts around and across these Nordic seas in a national and international context.

This study emanates from a project in which a group of Scandinavian scholars worked with various subjects within the cultural and maritime history of the Catte-gat-Skagerrak-region. The results from this project constitute a basis for the present work, but the author did not confine him-self to compilation. As demonstrated by the extensive bibliography, he has also been tracing and reading almost anything in print related to his field of investigation.

On the other hand, references to rel-ated international studies on, say, long term social and cultural change or ecological history are amazingly scarce, the works by Fernand Braudcl being among the notable exceptions. Both the long time perspective and the use of the concept of "mentalities" suggest a French influence. However, this is not a contribution to structural history in the vein of the Annales-school. Unlike the Mediterranean in Braudel's work, the Nordic seas and their environs are treated in this study as a more or less incidental spatial and environmental setting. Some-what disappointing too is the claim that this study spans almost four centuries. The data concerning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are confined to some short con-ventional and rather sweeping surveys. Most of the book in fact deals with the period from c. 1800-1914, for which the sources are more abundant and accessible.

Kystfolk does not present the reader with a coherent diachronic description, nor does it attempt an analysis of the long term contacts and cultural exchange. Learning about some artifact or custom in one place

and finding the same phenomenon in ano-ther location some years later does not prove that diffusion has occurred, let alone explain the process. The book does, how-ever, give more value for money when it comes to detailed information on Scandi-navian coastal communities in the nine-teenth century. Using information mostly from printed sources, Holm succeeds in presenting various aspects of maritime culture like seafaring, trade, fishing methods, and religious movements, to mention a few. This information would otherwise be hard to find, scattered as it is in numerous publications.

Poul H. Moustgaard Svendborg, Denmark

Ronald Rompkey. Grenfell of Labrador: A Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. xvi + 350 pp., map, photo-graphs, notes, bibliography, index. $35, cloth; ISBN 0-8020-5919-8.

In his prologue the author contends that Grenfell was not a conventional missionary devoted exclusively to saving souls and mending bodies but an innovator who real-ized that the way to improve the appalling living conditions endured by the impover-ished inhabitants of coastal Labrador was by way of social change. The case is made convincingly.

Drawing not only on the numerous books and articles written by Grenfell himself, Rompkey also makes extensive use of papers in private collections and public records to refocus attention on the social and economic conditions prevailing less than a century ago. Running through the inspiring story of one man and his cause is a regional history of what was one of the last untouched wild frontiers.

Rompkey traces Grenfell's career in

46 The Northern Mariner

detail, from obscure medical missionary to legendary figure whose writings and lec-tures were to attract not only many fol-lowers in Britain, Canada and America but, more importantly for his work, funds to endow schools, hospitals and to operate support vessels. His formative early years were spent as a doctor in one of London's East End hospitals, followed by short voyages providing medical back-up to the North Sea trawling and drifting fleets; he was subsequently employed in a similar capacity with the distant fleets in the waters off north-east Canada. The reader shares the elation and frustrations of this remark-able man and his supporting team of like minded doctors, nurses and administrators. At the same time it is a salutary tale. In his enthusiasm to achieve results Grenfell frequently exceeded the authority granted to him by the Mission to Deep Sea Fisher-men. He pursued a multitude of ideas, many of them good and practical, but without heed to the financial and human resources needed to make them enduring. He was not above ignoring the charitable constitution of the Mission by indulging in commercial enterprises to the chagrin of local traders, but it must be acknowledged his purpose was never for personal gain.

In his later years Grenfell was dogged by ill health and frustrated by the friction caused by his efforts to carry the same work load that he had as a younger man. He eventually resigned himself to fund raising, leaving the administration of the charity to others.

It is a tale well told. A larger scale detailed map would have been useful, but overall one welcomes the revival of a hero who was a legend within living memory.

Norman Hurst Coulsdon, England

James E. Vance, Jr. Capturing the Horizon: The Historical Geography of Transportation Since the Sixteenth Century. New York: Harper & Row, 1986; rev. ed., Baltimore, M D : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. xv + 660 pp., illustrations, figures, maps, notes, index. US $26.95, paper; ISBN 0-8018-4012-0.

This ambitious textbook is designed for undergraduate courses in the historical geography of transportation. The author examines all phases of transportation from the sixteenth century to the mid-1980s including canals, roads, ocean shipping, railroads, aviation, and automobiles. The time span is vast but the physical area covered is confined to Western Europe (Italy, France, the Low Countries and Great Britain), and North America. The marine portions of the volume are limited to the two chapters on canals and North Atlantic shipping. The author appears more at home with railways than with ships.

Of the two marine chapters the one on canals is the better. In "Canals of the Ren-aissance and Industrial Periods" Vance pro-vides a useful introduction to the early development of canals in Italy and the Low Countries to go along with the discussion of the canals of France. He takes great pains to show that the English canals of the Industrial Revolution were not the great innovations that they have been touted. The story is continued with North American canals, focusing on early American con-struction. The description of Canadian canals seems thrown in as an afterthought.

The chapter on North Atlantic ship-ping, on the evolution of the merchant marine and steam navigation, is perhaps the weakest in the book. Here are repeated several factual errors including the hoary old myth that the first steamship on the Great Lakes appeared in 1818. For a geo-

Book Reviews 47

graphy textbook, too much space is given to listing "firsts." Much of the chapter is devoted to narrating the development of North Atlantic steam passenger ships, with every advance in speed and tonnage delin-eated. This is done to the neglect of mana-gerial and technological developments that allowed the merchant sailing ship to pros-per into the 1870s. Similarly there is no mention of how these developments cre-ated the tramp ship in the nineteenth century, though note is made of the intro-duction of diesel engines and, later, of containers. Surprisingly for a geography text, there is no reference to Maury's sailing directions first published in 1847 and the subsequent improvement in aver-age sailing times. Clearly, much marine scholarship published before the mid-1980s was not used in the preparation of this volume. Thus, neither Ralph Davis's pion-eering work nor any of the early volumes of the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project are cited in the notes.

From a marine point of view this volume is not a success. While it appears to contain a great deal of useful information for students of American and British rail-roads, students of marine transportation will have to look elsewhere.

M. Stephen Salmon Ottawa, Ontario

H .M. Hignett (éd.). A Second Merseyside Maritime History: Transactions and research. Liverpool: Liverpool Nautical Research Society, 1991 [Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool 13 4AA]. 64 pp., pho-tographs, illustrations, figures, tables. £5.95, paper; ISBN 0-9513633-1-X.

With this collection of short essays, the Liverpool Nautical Research Society has sought to reflect the last three years of

maritime study undertaken by its members; if nothing else, it attests the scope and enthusiasm of their endeavours. No fewer than nine contributors address a rich diver-sity of subjects, ranging from early Mersey steamships to Gold Coast surf-boats, from maritime biography to shipping in post-war Japan, though naturally a local dimension is evident in most.

More than a decade's active research informs Peter Davies' survey of post-war Japan shipping. After a succinct review of Japan's economic transition between the Meiji restoration and World War II, Davies proceeds to examine the policy of US occu-pation authorities which he considers criti-cal to the reconstruction of trade and, hence, shipping. With some cogency, he dismisses the low-wage hypothesis of post-war success, and instead ascribes Japan's shipping ascendancy to superior managerial skill, reinforcing his case with a profusion of statistical data. Michael Stammers, as befits a museum director, prefers more aesthetic illustrations for his study of the Mersey sailing ferries, whose commercial demise on the Liverpool-Wirral routes came as late as 1865. The miscellaneous origins of these vessels will be an obvious source of fascination for aficionados of sail. Yet, as Stammers readily concedes, his conclusions are tentative and ample scope remains for further research. In "The Mer-seyside Records Centre: Its Holdings and Functions," Gordon Read aims to update Valerie Burton's definitive survey (Business Archives, November 1987), but provokes almost as many questions as he answers. Expansive on the nature of archival resources, he tends to evade the issues of function and policy objective, which consequently remain obscure.

The high quality of maritime biography is one of this book's main strengths. Adrian Jarvis offers valuable insight into the Mer-

48 The Northern Mariner

sey docks administration in his account of Harold Littledale (1803-89), whilst students of transatlantic shipping will be intrigued by H . M . Hignett's own biographical vign-ette, "Charles Maclver of Cunard." These are complemented by Charles Dawson's concise profile of the Swedish marine engineer, John Ericcson, which focuses on his early collaboration with the shipbuilding Laird brothers of Birkenhead. With equal authority, Alan Scarth investigates the provenance of early Mersey steamships (c. 1815-19), explaining both technology trans-fer from the Clyde and the construction of the first Liverpool paddle-steamer. While "The Surf-Boats of the Gold Coast, Ghana" represents little primary research, it does allow James Cowden to examine afresh a nautical theme of perennial interest. In contrast, A . H . Campbell's discussion of "British small bulk-carriers" seems limited in empirical content and in analysis.

If a general problem pervades this work, it consists in the brevity of essays. Some are mere aperitifs: wide participation has its price. Nevertheless, the editor has arrived at an appropriate and, in my view, effective formula to present historical studies of both professional and lay origin.

Andrew P. Armitage Liverpool, England

Yrjô Kaukiainen. Sailing into Twilight: Finnish Shipping in an Age of Transport Revolution, 1860-1914. Helsinki: Societas Historica Finlandiae, 1991; Studia Historica 39. 430 pp., tables, appendices, bibliogra-phy. F I M 140, paper; ISBN 951-8915-41-5.

The age of the sailing ship is one regarded in the popular mind with affection and nos-talgia. There is something wonderfully rom-antic about those old images of great tall ships under full canvas beating their way

across deep-blue oceans. Equally there is an indefinable sadness in images of derelict hulks lying on sand bars or mud flats in the years after steam finally conquered sail. The flotsam and jetsam of transport revol-utions touch some part of us that responds to a sense of lost golden ages, no matter how far from the reality of the time that sense may be. Boston clippers, Yarmouth barques or Finnish "peasant" ships-the emotional response to the demise of the sailing ship has been everywhere the same.

But behind the nostalgia lies a story of technical change, an emerging world econ-omy and concomitant global restructuring, and the rise and fall of national maritime economies. Modern shipping historians, assisted by a computer technology which finally permits the handling of vast quan-tities of data, have moved us beyond the vision of "Wooden Ships and Iron Men" into a hard-nosed assessment of the age of sail—its potential and its limitations for those regions which flourished briefly under canvas and then declined, having failed to make (for whatever reasons) the transition from sail to steam.

The first full-scale study of this kind was undertaken by the Atlantic Canada Shipping Project in the mid-1970s, the final results of which were published recently by Eric Sager with Gerald Panting under the title Maritime Capital (McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990). Sailing into Twilight is a parallel study, and a fine piece of work. It is not merely an analysis of one nation's fleets but sets Finnish shipping firmly and successfully in its international as well as national context. Kaukiainen addresses the "big" questions of economic development in a changing technological and economic world from the perspectives of structural change in the fleets, investment cycles, labour, productivity, income, profitability and competitiveness.

Book Reviews 49

To be a good maritime historian re-quires statistical expertise, caution, good judgement, technical know-how, patience (in large doses)~and imagination. Kaukiai-nen is amply endowed with all these qual-ities, and in pleasing proportions: this is a balanced book. It is also impressively wide-ranging in its consideration of pertinent explanatory variables, including those that are fiendishly difficult to handle, such as the "qualitative characteristics" of skill, know-how, education and entrepreneurship. Beyond that, there are several sections of the book devoted to data, methodology, measurement techniques and difficulties-discussions which are useful and build confidence in the author's conclusions.

In short, this is a lovely book. While one might quibble over the occasional awk-wardness in grammar or sentence structure ("data" are plural in English), to do so would be churlish; it would, I think, also be beside the point, namely that this is a scholarly, thoughtful, careful and insightful analysis of Finnish shipping. If read with comparable analyses of other national fleets in mind, it makes a contribution to knowledge that goes far beyond the mere compilation of a national data set. It makes a vital contribution to the analytical jigsaw puzzle that international maritime history, in essence, must be. I recommend it highly.

Rosemary E. Ommer St. John's, Newfoundland

James M. Cameron. The Ships, Ship-builders and Seamen ofPictou County. New Glasgow, NS: The Pictou County Historical Society, 1990.191 pp., photographs, appen-dices, index. $10, paper.

This is another of those local histories which can only be written by someone with a good knowledge of their district and

access to local sources of information, both recorded and personal. James Cameron, now retired, has been a journalist, editor and radio station manager; in World War II he served in the Canadian Artillery. He is the author of numerous books, booklets and historical papers dealing with Pictou County, Scottish and military history.

The book's first eight chapters deal with the shipbuilding industry, district by district. Shipbuilding had an earlier start in Pictou County than in most parts of Nova Scotia, when Captain William Lowden built several ships of up to 600 tons in the 1790s. After that, shipbuilding in the county fol-lowed the pattern seen in other parts of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island: inexpensive vessels of rather poor quality for sale abroad, together with their timber cargoes, in the 1830s to 1850s. Then came better quality ships, owned and operated by Pictou County residents in the coastal West Indian and world-wide trades, until sailing ships were supplanted by steel steamers at the end of the century. In the late 1800s, the county's most important shipping line was the Carmichael Company which, for many years, operated large steel sailing ships (built abroad) and steamers, as well as locally built vessels.

Cameron has some interesting com-ments on the failure of Nova Scotia ship-builders to switch to steel construction. The Trenton steel plant was built at the turn of the century, and although a few such ves-sels were constructed, including the only Canadian steel three-masted schooner, the operators of the steel industry were con-cerned mainly with the development of the railway system.

Nevertheless, some steel ships were built in Trenton during World War I, and twenty-four standard "Park" ships, (4700 ton type), were built in the Foundation Maritime yard in Pictou (later Ferguson

50 The Northern Mariner

Industries) during World War II. Appen-dices list the ships built (as far as is known) in the various areas and in Fer-guson Industries to the present day.

The next section of the book is devoted to people: the shipmasters and other prom-inent seamen. While not necessarily com-plete, this is extensive and as detailed as possible. It is supplemented by a list, com-piled in 1950 by Captain D . M . Mackenzie, of shipmasters he recalled. On the Navy side, the most prominent Pictou County officer was Rear-Admiral L.W. Murray, CIC Northwest Atlantic in World War II, who was rather unfairly blamed for not preventing the Halifax VE Day riot. This account of seamen includes quite recent graduates of the Coast Guard College in Sydney, Nova Scotia, but is rather short of information about marine engineers.

Apart from all this data, there are tales of disasters, shipwrecks, rescues and other adventures. I found little about the Caribou to Woods Island service of Northumber-land Ferries; perhaps Cameron considers this more part of PEI maritime history.

Add this book to others of its type, the locally published histories of the various maritime regions of these provinces, and you will have a lot of interesting informa-tion at your disposal for a very modest price.

C. Douglas Maginley Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia

Ian Dear. Shipwreck! London: Portman Books, 1990. 127 pp., photographs. £19.95, cloth; ISBN 0-7134-5953-0.

The exclamation mark in the title of Ship-wreck! is symptomatic of what is unsatisfy-ing about this book. Certainly, a succinct introduction discusses a number of the issues contributing to shipwrecks: weather,

fire, collision, human error, deficiencies in ship design, inexperienced crews. Few of these matters, however, are documented by the book's 101 photographs taken in British waters between 1872 and 1986, which focus attention on shipwrecks entirely as spec-tacle~a very narrow perspective indeed. There's a numbing sameness about the rel-entless procession of photographs sur-rounded, as it were, by figurative exclama-tion marks. Compounding the impression of sameness is the regrettably poor quality of reproduction, which robs the images of much of their detail. That is a pity, because the author has drawn upon the resources of several institutions in Britain, such as the Royal Naval Lifeboat Institution, the Wey-mouth Museum, the Nautical Institute, the Royal Naval Air Station at Culdrose, and the picturesquely-named Blackgang Chine Museum. Many of the photographs are by members of the renowned Gibson family, whose work has already been seen to better advantage in the book Island Camera: the Isles of Scilly in the Photography of the Gibson Family, published in 1972.

Peter Robertson Ottawa, Ontario

Gustav Saetra; Halvor Moe (trans.). Him-mel og Hav (Shipping and Beyond). Aren-dal, Norway. Arnt J. Merland, 1991 [order from FM. Daniclsen, p.b. 113, 4801 Aren-dal, Norway]. 380 pp., photographs, maps, figures, tables, bibliography, appendix. 225 NKr, cloth; ISBN 82-992459-0-7.

For the occasion of the seventy-fifth anni-versary of their shipping company, its present owners, Arnt Jacob Merland and Thorbj0rn Morland, descendants of the company's founders, commissioned Gustav Saetra to produce a history of their firm. Saetra, Chief Archivist at the Aust Agder

Book Reviews 51

Archives, did himself proud and so did the M0rlands, first by keeping such extensive archives of their company and then by opening their archives to the author and leaving him a free hand in making use of the archival material.

The result is an exemplary history of a shipping company, the likes of which I have never before encountered. Besides tracing the family history back to 1500, it covers every aspect of ship owning: building, buy-ing and selling of ships; coping with techno-logical changes; managing the company through recessions, two world wars and the always changing trade patterns. What is most striking about this company history, however, is the space given to the life and work of the seamen who served aboard the M0rland ships (including female crew members), the social responsibilities the company felt towards them, and the prob-lems it encountered, as a company which believed in temperance, with crews who treasured their traditional strong drinks.

The author is very enlightening in covering the change-over from a national fleet manned entirely by Norwegians to present day Norwegian-owned ships under flags of convenience and under the Norwe-gian International Register manned mainly by Indian and Filipino crews. The Nor-lands tried to counter the international competition by such measures as reorganiz-ation and automation but, in the end, they were forced to follow world-wide trends. However, because of present (1991) devel-opments in shipping, the Company is opti-mistic about the prospects of increasing the number of Norwegians aboard its ships.

The book, hardcover and printed on high quality glossy stock is a joy to behold. There are circa 170 illustrations, including many reproductions of snapshots taken aboard Mgrland ships, as well as extensive notes and tables. Together they create a

veritable social history of sea-going during the past seventy-five years, a history that is of great appeal to me as a former mer-chant seaman and a history which could be an eye-opener to many marine historians who never had a chance to serve aboard ships. And, to top it all, the book is printed in two languages-again thanks to the M0rlands—in two columns per page, Nor-wegian to the left and English to the right!

Do write for a copy before they are all gone. It may be a long time before you will again find a shipping company history of such quality.

Niels Jannasch Tantallon, Nova Scotia

David C. Holly. Tidewater by Steamboat: A Saga of the Chesapeake. Baltimore, M D : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. xxii + 314 pp., photographs, figures, maps, tables, notes, index. US $29.95, cloth; ISBN 0-8018-4168-2.

David Holly offers an extended look at one of the longest lived steamboat lines in the Chesapeake region, mixing a fair degree of nostalgia with a fascination for the steam-boats and the remarkable circumstances which allowed them to thrive through much of the nineteenth century.

The Weems Steamboat Company of Baltimore was incorporated in 1891 but the family had been actively involved in steam-boat operations on the Chesapeake since 1819. They, (and in their wake, the author) date the history of the line from that earlier date when George Weems pur-chased the Surprise. It was a thoroughly inauspicious beginning: the purchase price was in excess of $20,000 in 1819 yet she was sold for $800 in 1822! Indeed, by the beginning of the Civil War, the line still consisted of only three vessels. This num-

52 The Northern Mariner

ber grew steadily over the next forty years until the firm operated ten steamers. After a number of false starts the ante-bellum line had focused on serving the Patuxent River landings, later the Rappahonnock up to Fredericksburg, and finally the Potomac to Washington. The Weems steamers linked all these tidewater landings and ports with Baltimore. In late 1904 the family sold out to the Maryland, Delaware and Virginia Railroad Company, a subsidi-ary of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

In preparing this volume Holly had access to collections of business and family papers in the Maryland Historical Society, the Hagley Museum as well as private collections of the Weems descendants. These, combined with a wide range of newspaper citations and a range of articles and books on the Chesapeake, provided the basis for the account. The seven appendices show the range of interests of the author: twenty-four pages describing all the Weems vessels in the style of the Belgian Ship-lovers lists; eleven pages of steamboat schedules; twenty-three pages of notes on the history of the landings on the three rivers served at the turn of the century, and six pages of Weems genealogy. In addition, the author has assembled some ten pages of accounts, charters and construction agreements for various vessels and offers four pages of extracts from the company minute books after 1891. The respective paginations reflect the author's success in capturing different facets of the career of the Weems line. The evolving steamers and their varying routes occupy the better part of the narrative. Holly tries, with general success, to put this in the context of the other steamer operations on the Chesa-peake. Much less attention is paid to the business side of affairs. Part of this is unquestionably because less data appears to be available, but certain issues could still

have been probed more deeply. The first chapters assume that George Weems was in charge of most major operational deci-sions, although it becomes clear that he had partners, partners who were interested in other shipping. The return on investment might have been pursued more vigorously for the years where there was data. The chapter "Steamboat Life through the Years" is the only section to take a look at the nature of the crew and life aboard ship, ranging from the slaves used prior to the Civil War to "Old Nance," the cat and "prime ratter" aboard the Richmond. Throughout, the style of presentation pres-ents the labour history in the same anecdo-tal style that graces the rest of the volume.

For the reader relatively unfamiliar with the Chesapeake, the volume is a minefield of tongue-twisting, unfamiliar geography. Unfortunately the charts are buried in the middle of the appendices, over fifty pages from the end of the vol-ume. They are hardly up to the profess-ional standards of presentation that charac-terize the rest of the volume. Otherwise the Johns Hopkins University Press and the Calvert Marine Museum have a volume of which to be proud. To the general reader with a good chart of the Chesapeake at his elbow the volume is a fairly good read.

Walter Lewis Acton, Ontario

George Nau Burridge. Green Bay Work-horses: The Nau Tug Line. Manitowoc, WI: Manitowoc Maritime Museum, 1991 [75 Maritime Drive, Manitowoc, WI 54220]. xviii + 202 pp., maps, graphs, tables, pho-tographs, bibliography, index. US $39.95, cloth or $25.95, paper; ISBN 0-9629219-1-2.

The author employed the financial records of the family tug line on Lake Michigan's

Book Reviews 53

Green Bay between the years 1890 and 1917 as the foundation of this history. It attempts to capture and preserve the era of towing large rafts of pulpwood on Green Bay and the Upper Lakes, a topic that has previously received scant attention from historians. Exhaustive detail and technical data are supported by maps, a fine collec-tion of photographs, graphs, and even a helpful glossary of abbreviations and terms. Green Bay Workhorses sets a high standard of research for future local and regional histories of the Great Lakes area.

Following a brief history of the Nau Tug Line, Burridge provides a chronologi-cal "biography" of each of the eleven tugs owned by the company, accompanied by a "Log" for each vessel drawn from local newspaper references. Unfortunately, this develops into a disconcerting repetition of the narrative. Frequent documentation of the great variety of vessels that were part of the busy traffic in and out of the port of Green Bay appeal to readers with a more than local interest in shipping. The author wisely reserves the more mundane financial details of the firm for the last chapters and finishes, in Chapter VII, with an account of "Rafting, Pulpwood and The Paper Indus-try" which transcends the Green Bay locale.

This is an important addition to Great Lakes scholarship, perhaps as much for its shortcomings as its strengths. Burridge eschews the tales of shipwrecks and marine disasters which have been all too character-istic of Great Lakes historical writing, but his book suffers from a near-fatal lack of any thesis. Burridge neither asks nor answers any questions beyond the trivial. His all too frequent recourse to newspaper clippings results more in a collection of the "stuff" of which history is made than history itself. This leaves the distinct impression that Burridge, having done very extensive research, has assembled a body of material

that he doesn't know what to do with. Mr. Burridge has presented the Great

Lakes historical community with a signifi-cant challenge-to focus on the less sensa-tional aspects of our maritime history without losing sight of the universality that pervades all human activities.

Frank Prothero Port Stanley, Ontario

W. Kaye Lamb. Empress to the Orient. Vancouver: Vancouver Maritime Museum, 1991. 148 pp., photographs, appendices. $34.95, cloth; ISBN 0-9695221-2-6. $19.95, paper.

One of the pleasant results of the recent exhibit at the Vancouver Maritime Museum, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Canadian Pacific Rail-way's famous trans-Pacific "Empress" ser-vice, is the publication of a magnificent edition of former Dominion Archivist Dr. W. Kaye Lamb's history of the line.

Lamb has had a keen interest in the lore of ships since his boyhood, and he first wrote the story of the Empresses in a series of articles in the British Columbia Historical Quarterly in the 1930s and '40s. He wrote at a time when he knew and int-erviewed many of the pioneers of the trans-Pacific service, and before the operations ended for good during World War II.

These articles have long been out of print. Fortunately Dr. Lamb is still keenly interested in the history of shipping and able to up-date his original articles so that they are now available for the first time to sealovers. It is a record of a great era of luxurious ocean travel, and a record of the great ships themselves: how they were fin-anced and built, how they were captained and crewed, their operations in peace and war, and how they ended their lives.

54 The Northern Mariner

Appendices include specifications of each ship, traffic statistics, service perform-ances and record passages. The book is lavishly illustrated, with a full colour pic-ture of the figure-head of the first Empress of Japan on the cover.

Norman Hacking North Vancouver, British Columbia

Frank O. Braynard. Classic Ocean Liners, Volume 1: Berengaria, Leviathan & Majestic. Sparkford, Nr. Yeovil: Patrick Stephens, 1990. 176 pp., photographs, illustrations, index £20, cloth; ISBN 1-85260-151-5.

This is the first of an ambitious series of books by noted marine historian Frank O. Braynard, with each volume designed to tell in depth the story of several great (and inter-related) liners. For his first volume he has chosen the big three of the Hamburg American Line—Albert Ballin's Imperator, Vaterland, and Bismarck. The goal of a fortnightly trans-Atlantic service maintained by three ships of comparable stature, was not to be obtained by Hapag any more than it had been by the White Star Line. The intervention of World War I saw to that, and the subsequent dispersal as repar-ations resulted in the three sisters ending up in the employ of three different lines under their more famous names Berengaria, Leviathan, and Majestic.

Braynard has produced a highly read-able and well-illustrated history of the three liners, making use of his extensive research into every facet of their lives. His choice of illustrations culled largely from his own private collection makes for a product which does not have to rely on the same tired images seen in many other titles.

Having lauded Braynard's entertaining and bree2y, conversational style, it pains me to have to say that this work is very

much flawed. For a book that so extensive-ly illustrates the marvellous interior design of these three superliners, nowhere is the name Charles Mewes, Hapag's famed int-erior designer, mentioned. This omission is an unforgivable oversight. Even worse is Braynard's use of this book to help flog the 12,000 unsold volumes of his six-volume series on the Leviathan. There is no subtlety in the sales pitch, and it is amplified by the brevity of his chapter on that liner. For information on her restora-tion after World War I and the structural weaknesses that caused her almost to crack in half in a storm, we are told little, other than to read the Leviathan series. The Leviathan has been Braynard's lifelong passion—hence the mammoth series on this one liner-but the blatant sales pitch made in an effort to clear his cellar, detracts from what could have been an important work, and it cheapens the final product.

Braynard raises a number of questions and lines of thought which could have been explored in some greater depth. Could the use of one-way wiring, which was the root cause of the series of fires which spelled the end of the Berengaria, also explain the fire that ended the life of the Majestic in her final incarnation as the British training ship Caledonia! The number of third class passengers carried on the Imperatofs maid-en voyage exceeded third class capacity by some 700, leaving one to wonder if at that time price cutting on higher class accom-modations was as common as it is today.

To conclude, Classic Ocean Liners would have benefitted from having the story of the three liners interwoven chrono-logically rather than recounted separately in a somewhat disjointed fashion. Footnotes would also have been preferable to weaving the source of quotations (including the publisher's) into the text.

Classic Ocean Liners is a book that no

Book Reviews 55

ocean liner enthusiast would want to be without and for that reason I would recom-mend its acquisition; however, it should have been much better.

John Davies Vancouver, British Columbia

Lionel Casson. The Ancient Mariners: Seafarers and Sea Fighters of the Mediter-ranean in Ancient Times. 2nd. ed.; Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. xviii + 246 pp., maps, figures, plates, table, bibliography, index. US $39.95, cloth; ISBN 0-691-06836-4 and US $12.95, paper; ISBN 0-691-01477-9.

When first published in 1959, this book was an immediate success, presenting in read-able form the vast panorama of ships and shipping from the dawn of nautical history to the first century of our time. Written by a mariner, it has been of inestimable value to the student of pre-history, and it under-lines the major contribution of the men of the sea in the growth and development of the civilized world today. Egyptians, Sumer-ians, Minoans, Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans, all take their places in this pag-eant of the seas, from the primitive craft to the great sailing ships of the Greeks and Romans at the end of the era.

Egypt and the Persian Gulf mariners were the first to use sail, and together with their South Arabian cousins controlled the East African sea-route by ancient right from pre-dynastic times. However, the dominant sea-people from the earliest days were the Minoans and Phoenicians who were finally ousted by the Greeks and Romans in a mastery of the sea-lanes which took them as far as India and Malaya before the present era. To the ordinary reader the essence of the story is not in the orderly sequence of historic

events, but in the author's unique ability to convey the authentic atmosphere of the fierce sea-fights, naval battles, piracy, plunder and sharp trading in ancient times. People, places and events are so vividly portrayed that their lives and times come alive to provide an absorbing story of men and women not so different from ourselves.

This edition has been totally revised, though Casson still places the ancient Land of Punt in the Red Sea, and Ophir in India, when according to authoritative sources Punt was not in Egypt's home waters but a distant three-year return voyage down the coast of East Africa; the journey was described in meticulous detail by Queen Hatshepsut's naval expedition in 1475 BC. Africa was known as Ophir in King Solo-mon's day, and that is the translation from the Hebrew language. A fully explanatory bibliography completes this concise, well-illustrated history, and further evidence of early Mediterranean influences in the Americas is to be found in James Bailey's important book, The God Kings and the Titans (Hodder and Stoughton, 1973).

Edmund Layland Cape Town, South Africa

Robert McGhee. Canada Rediscovered. Hull: Canadian Museum of Civilization/ Libre Expression. 176 pp., maps, photo-graphs, illustrations, index. $29.95, library binding; ISBN 0-660-12919-1. Distributed by the University of Toronto Press.

J J . Sharp. Discovery in the North Atlantic from the 6th to 17th Century. Halifax: Nim-bus Publishing, 1991. xx + 138 pp., illustra-tions, bibliography, index. $12.95; ISBN 0-921054-89-0.

Both these books survey European encoun-ters with Canada, from St. Brendan's puta-

56 The Northern Mariner

tive voyages to the first colonial settle-ments. One comes from the Canadian Mu-seum of Civilization and a member of its staff; the other from a small publisher in Halifax and a writer previously unknown in this field. Both are addressed more to the casual reader than the scholar.

Canada Rediscovered is a sequel to McGhee's Ancient Canada, an illustrated tour of prehistoric Canadian cultures and sites. By profession McGhee is a specialist in arctic archaeology with the Archaeologi-cal Survey of Canada. In his spare time, he is our most interesting general writer on archaeological mattCTS.Ancient Canada was a striking and original work, certainly worthy of a place beside the lavishly illus-trated works on old-world archaeology for which so many bookstores seem to find room.

Canada Rediscovered is rather less impressive because the territory is so much more familiar. On the heterogeneous col-lection of European sailors who bumped up against Canadian shores before 1600, Mc-Ghee writes well and chooses sensibly, but most of these voyages left no archaeologi-cal traces. McGhee summarizes his scholar-ly analyses (surely the best currently avail-able) of Norse and other pre-Columbian voyages to North America, and writes with enthusiasm about the recently excavated Basque whaling stations at Red Bay, Labrador. But on Cabot, CorteReal, Car-tier and the rest, he is sailing familiar historical territory, conjecturing from what scattered maps and scarce documents sug-gest about a host of minor European voy-agers. He does it well, and his text is sup-ported by many well-chosen colour illustra-tions (some were commissioned for this book).

Without the public subsidy or the colour illustrations of McGhee's book, J J. Sharp's survey of the same voyages takes

the form of an old-fashioned narrative, with many quotations from the explorers' own writings and from published works about them. It is also overpoweringly familiar. Less rooted in original sources or special expertise than the major works in the field, it also lacks the critical spin of the dis-covery-as-genocide works inspired by the Columbus anniversary. It seems to me worthy but undistinguished, one more title on an overcrowded shelf.

Where the two books differ, McGhee is usually more detailed and his analysis more persuasive. Perhaps inevitably, both are inclined to make the most of even the slimmest evidence. Sharp, to shore up his belief that there must be something to the legend of St. Brendan's voyage, cites as evidence McGhee's 1974 discovery of an allegedly Irish inscription on stone from St. Lunaire, Newfoundland. McGhee himself seems to have repudiated that, nor is it mentioned in his consideration of Irish Atlantic voyages.

Both works consider shipbuilding, navigational techniques, seamanship, and mapping as aspects of their story. McGhee is generally more informative, but neither work is strikingly new on these matters. Sharp cites his sources; McGhee, who has surely read more, does not.

Neither book gives more than a nod to the controversy about the meaning of discovery that the Columbus anniversary has provoked. McGhee, however, can point to the "re" in his title, and to his previous book on native perspectives to balance this one. Sharp is absolutely Eurocentric

To my eye, the same question haunts both books. How badly do we need another illustrated popular survey of the early voyages?

Christopher Moore Toronto, Ontario

Book Reviews 57

David B. Quinn. Explorers and Colonies: America, 1500-1625. London + Ronceverte, WV: The Hambledon Press, 1990. xii + 449 pp., maps, illustrations, index. £35, US $60, cloth; ISBN 1-85285-024-8.

A leading historian of the early history of maritime discovery, Quinn collected twenty-five of his articles and book chapters for renewed publication in this volume. The essays, dating from the 1940s to the 1980s, illustrate Quinn's great breadth of interest in European exploration from broad syn-thesis to specialized topics related to the geography, cartography, and literature of marine exploration. While most chapters focus upon British exploration, Quinn has a masterful grasp of the forces that impelled all of the European powers to establish American colonies. His 1987 Walter Prescott Webb lecture "Colonies in the Beginning: Examples from North America," is a fine analysis of the different impulses that drove the European powers. While it is difficult to categorize the essays, several relate to the exploits and voyages of familiar maritime figures or their backers such as Sir Francis Drake, Sir Humphrey Gilbert and Richard Hakluyt. Quinn exam-ines aspects of the European background to exploration and diplomacy and he ex-plores both successful and failed attempts to colonize the North American littoral from Newfoundland to Florida. His essay on the abortive French colony in Florida, 1562-1565, fully portrays the religious divisions and hatreds of the sixteenth cen-tury as the Spaniards, commanded by Pedro Menéndex de Aviles, butchered the Protestant settlers in cold blood.

Quinn possesses a remarkable range of research interests and topics. Unlike many historians of early maritime exploration, he fully values the discovery of Newfoundland and the exploitation of the fisheries in the

sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries— as similar in significance for Europe as the much more romantic and exciting exploita-tion of the silver and gold mines of the Spanish empire. Several chapters examine lesser known maritime activities that in some cases did not produce longer term results. The study on the voyage of Triad, 1606-1607, illustrates the difficulties of marine affairs in an era of confused juris-diction, piracy, warfare, and poor commun-ications. Quinn's topics range from early maps and charts of North America; advice to potential investors in Virginia, Bermuda, and Newfoundland; books to be purchased for the Virginia Company, and the role of the Welsh in marine exploration. Despite the variety of subjects and themes, Quinn constantly assesses changing perceptions as Europeans learned to understand and to deal with the full significance of the New World. While most of these essays may be found elsewhere, this anthology makes easily accessible a valuable compilation for readers of maritime history.

Christon I. Archer Calgary, Alberta

Gayle K. Brunelle. The New World Mer-chants of Rouen, 1559-1630. Kirksville, M O : Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1991. x + 190 pp., tables, figures, maps, bibli-ography, index. US $35, cloth; ISBN 0-940474-17-4.

The exceptionally complete archives of Rouen, above all the massive Tabellionage or notarial records, form the basis of Brun-elle's meticulous study of a group of weal-thy commercial families in what was prob-ably France's second city in the sixteenth century. After eighty years of sustained economic growth, Rouen's contacts with the New World peaked in the 1550s, but

58 The Northern Mariner

the disturbances of the Wars of Religion, together with the bankruptcies of the crowns of France and Spain, the high incidence of piracy, and the outbreak in 1585 of European conflict, undermined Rouen's trade. Only a few major merchants survived the winnowing process, and the trading conditions of the early seventeenth century were very different, as the French monarchy became more inclined to restrict and control commerce by the use of char-tered companies. After 1595, Rouen's merchant community was significantly smaller, and the percentage engaging in international trade, as distinct from retail and domestic trade, also shrank.

The first three chapters outline the growth of the Rouennais economy, the net-work of French commerce and colonization in the New World, and the investors who financed voyages. Rouen's transatlantic trade was divided into two distinct branches; commerce with Brazil was mostly in luxury goods, particularly brazilwood for dyeing, while ships went to Newfoundland solely for cod. Voyages were financed by a risk-limiting system of shares and loans, with a core group of around sixty mer-chants who invested both frequently and for commercial purposes, rather than for colonization or exploration. The rest of the book focuses on the investors' strategies for social mobility, their purchases of rentes, land and municipal office, their kinship links and finally, where it can be discerned, their religious affiliation amidst the confes-sional strife that caused such upheaval in Rouen in the second half of the century. Readers of this journal may find them-selves wishing that the rather routine and sketchy chapters on New World commerce had been fuller and more detailed, since the subject is of such intrinsic interest, and the archival material obviously very inform-ative. However, Brunelle's stated aim was

not to write the history of a particular trade, but rather to bridge the gap between studies of commerce and studies of social mobility, using the New World investors as an access group, since she argues that only successful international trade could provide enough liquid capital for the purchase of office. She finds nothing that distinguishes the transatlantic merchants from their col-leagues in other trades, except perhaps "some intangible entrepreneurial spirit that may have pushed [them] to risk their capi-tal on the more hazardous New World voy-ages when less adventurous merchants would not." Her book adds much of value to current knowledge of the dynamics of French urban society, but rather less to our picture of the transatlantic trades in this vital period.

Pauline Croft London, England

Els M. Jacobs. In Pursuit of Pepper and Tea. The Story of the Dutch East India Company. Zutphen: De Walburg Pers, 1991.96 pp., maps, photographs. Hfl. 19,50, paper; ISBN 90-6011-739-5.

This booklet is the companion-volume to a revised permanent exhibition on the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the Dutch maritime museum at Amsterdam. Most of the fine photographs are exhibits of the museum. It is an account of the shipping between the Netherlands and Asia for one who does not have time or chance to turn to the forbiddingly massive volumes in the grand series of Dutch national historic publications (Rijksgeschiedkundige publico-ties) upon which the booklet is based. It contains a good description of the ship-building of the Company, and a fine por-trayal of the life aboard the East-India men and its crews. Not enough is known about

Book Reviews 59

the sailors, though, to warrant the cher-ished, but in my view wrong, inference that "all of them were born in the lower level of society or from orphanages." (p. 38) One should be wary of bestowing too much faith to the habitual complaints of the directors about the "scum." The description of the draconic punishments on board is probably somewhat overdrawn too. Take the punish-ment for drawing a knife: putting a knife through the culprit's hand. (p. 41) As far as I know, this was not a normal procedure. Such quibbles aside, however, the treat-ment of the ships, the routes between Europe and Asia, shipboard life, the organ-ization of the Company in the Netherlands and the description of its buildings and wharves is brief, but illuminating.

Jacobs is far less successful when treating the trade of the Company in Asia and the trade between Europe and Asia. The extremely limited space devoted to large and often complex and unsettled issues, such as the decline of the VOC, or its impact upon the Javanese and Ambon-ese society, force Jacobs to one-sided, if not altogether faulty, statements. Again, in keeping with much Dutch literature, Jacobs considers the V O C as a trading venture, largely ignoring its role as an early colonial state. Thus, she does not treat the mission-ary activities of the VOC, its territorial administration, or its relations with the English, Portuguese and French settlements in Asia. Such questions ought to have merited attention in a "story" of the VOC, however brief. Jacobs ought rather to have titled the book: In Pursuit of the Tropics: Ships, Sailors and Buildings of the Dutch East India Company. With such a more restricted title the book might have been safely recommended.

R J . Barendse Leiden, The Netherlands

William R. Roberts and Jack Sweetman (eds.). New Interpretations in Naval History: Selected Papers from the Ninth Naval His-tory Symposium. Annapolis, M D : Naval In-stitute Press, 1991. xxi + 368 pp., maps, photographs, diagrams. US $26.95, Cdn $36.95, cloth; ISBN 1-55750-724-4. Cana-dian distributor, Vanwell Publishing, St. Catharines, Ont.

The publication of the proceedings of the symposia at Annapolis is an essential ser-vice to the naval history community. These vast events, at which the attendees dash about to try to catch as much as possible at concurrent sessions, are a clear case where the stage production itself is not sufficient: you have to read the book. This volume, like its predecessors, rewards the effort.

The ninth symposium is notable for the breadth of subject matter, which runs the whole gamut from the Aegean in the fifth century BC to US operations in Vietnam. International participation is significant. Of the twenty-three authors, six came a con-siderable distance-from Germany, Finland, Peru, Greece, the Netherlands and Great Britain-most of them to discuss the dis-tinctive experiences of their nations. The emphasis on subjects other than well-known campaigns and controversies is particularly satisfying. The thread linking many of the papers is an attempt to under-stand the practical difficulties of keeping warships at sea in peace and war: the design of ancient fighting vessels; training, discipline and leadership in the Greek navy during the Balkan War of 1912-13, the Peruvian navy in the 1920s, and the Dutch navy of the 1930s; the challenges to Ger-man U-boats in mounting clandestine operations during the Spanish Civil War, and to the US Navy in containing the Vichy French fleet at Martinique by means short of war in 1940-3; and inter-service friction

60 The Northern Mariner

in the exquisitely tricky art of amphibious operations during the American Revolution and World War II

The book is a good read. The papers relate well one to another and follow in a logical sequence, a credit to the organizers of the sessions of the conference. Each is written in a clear style, a credit to the authors and editors. A uniform strength among all of the papers is the considerable amount of information presented, much of it fresh and all of it thoroughly docu-mented. A few suffer somewhat from a lack of bibliographical or analytical dis-cussion to provide context to narrative.

One of the most stimulating features of the Annapolis symposia is the forthright-ness of some of the commentators. Fortu-nately the editors have printed the com-mentary for two of the outstanding sessions—on the ancient Aegean fleets, and on US Marine Corps counter-insurgency operations. A remark about one of the controversial papers deserves quotation: "I cannot help but say that for many years [the author] has marched to a different drummer." (p. 53) The spirit is friendly, but the discussion pointed, and that is the hallmark of a truly successful conference.

Roger Sarty Ottawa, Ontario

Philippe de Villette-Mursay. Mes cam-pagnes de mer sous LouisXIV. Introduction et notes par Michel Vergé-Franceschi, avec un dictionnaire des personnages et des batailles. Paris: Tallandier, 1991. 465 pp. FF140, paper; ISBN 2-235-02047-X.

Philippe Le Vallois, future marquis de Villette-Mursay was born in 1632. A stiff-necked Huguenot cavalry officer, unem-ployed since the end of the Franco-Spanish Wars (1635-1659), he was on half-pay and

destined to remain mired on his lands in Poitou when in 1672 he joined the French navy. His cousin, the future Madame de Maintenon, obtained the appointment. While he was not a typical French naval officer during the expansion that occurred under Louis XIV, Villette-Mursay's career does allow historians greater comprehen-sion of the navy's growth and development during the final third of the seventeenth century. An officer and a gentleman, he evinced no regard for la guerre de course or for commoners who entered the service through the merchant marine or from the commercial classes in the sea ports. A member of the military, landed nobility, his presence in the navy reflects the heterogen-eity of recruitment in Louis XIV's young navy as well as the predominance of his class in the new officer corps. As the editor points out, Villette-Mursay was both a witness and an actor.

He entered the navy as a capitaine de vaisseau and made nineteen campaigns during the next thirty-two years. The open-ing of the Dutch War found Colbert short of suitable commanders for the ships of his rapidly expanding navy, and Villette-Mur-say immediately assumed second-in-com-mand of a third-rate in the Mediterranean. He obtained his own ship two years later and fought his first action in 1676. Later the same year he was wounded at Agosta fighting against the Dutch under Admiral de Ruyter. Following the Dutch War, Vi l -lette-Mursay made several campaigns inclu-ding a very extended one to the West Indies between 1678 and 1681. But despite his growing experience and good record further promotion was denied him until, like many Protestant officers, he abjured his faith in 1685. This action earned him appointment to flag rank almost immedi-ately and three years later he was pro-moted to lieutenant-général des armées navales.

Book Reviews 61

During the War of the League of Augsburg Villette-Mursay commanded divisions in the major battles and naval actions: Béveziers or Beachy Head (1690), Barfleur or La Hogue (1692), Bantry Bay (1689), the Smyrna Convoy (1693) and Tortosa (1694). By the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession he had become one of the senior members of the officer corps and, through his cousin's influence, mentor to the Admiral of France, the young comte de Toulouse. In 1704, at age 72, he went to sea for the last time, com-manding the van of Toulouse's fleet in the bloody but indecisive battle of Velez-Mala-ga. He died on Christmas Day three years later.

The memoirs which Villette-Mursay wrote at the behest of Toulouse are based on his sea-journals and are rather laconic. Their merit lies in his witness as compan-ion in arms of Duquesne, a second to d'Estrées and Tourville, collaborator with Chateaurenault and Courbon-Blénac, and tutor of Toulouse. Published once before in 1844, this new, critical edition marks an immeasurable improvement for the editor, who has written extensively about the officer corps of the Old Regime navy, has contributed an excellent introductory essay tracing the author's career and placing it in a well-developed social-cultural as well as naval context. He has also carefully anno-tated all of the sea-terms employed in the memoirs and contributed a valuable dic-tionary of people and naval battles and engagements mentioned in the memoirs. Indeed, the editor's contribution, providing context, elaboration, and definition makes this a very useful reference that will appeal to many beyond students of Louis XIV's navy. Librarians take note.

James Pritchard Kingston, Ontario

J.D. Davies. Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy. Oxford: Clarendon Press and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. xii + 270 pp., tables, bibliography, index. $89.50, cloth; ISBN 0-19-820263-6.

The Restoration Navy is finally being rescued from some of the unflattering judgements of its saviour, Samuel Pepys. This monograph also challenges Macaula/s too memorable charge: "There were gentle-men and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen." To explore the contest between gentlemen and tarpaulins, Davies under-takes a social and political analysis of the Restoration Navy.

It was only in peacetime, between 1674 and 1688, that most naval commissions went to gentlemen, who had to know some-thing of seamanship in order to pass the rigorous examination for lieutenants insti-tuted by Pepys in 1677. Collisions between the growing professional solidarity among the officers and the growing bureaucratic centralization of government were endemic. Government insistence upon regular mus-ters and sea journals was effectively enforced by withholding pay, but unauthor-ized leaves, drunkenness, and fraud were never adequately controlled. Although an officer's commission was more profitable in the navy than in the army, especially for those awarded the lucrative Mediterranean voyages, naval officers seldom left substan-tial estates. The statistical side of this group biography is quite disappointing, and a related article would be welcome. Infor-mation gathered by Davies on the career paths of 784 officers deserves thorough analysis for age, origins, length of service, promotions, life expectancies, estates, etc., not merely sampled for a table on gentle-

62 The Northern Mariner

men vs. tarpaulin commissions. Although this work is overwhelmingly

about naval officers, the more impressionis-tic discussion of the "men" of the subtitle offers some insights. During wartime, between a third and a half of the maritime community was in the navy. Although most seem to have been volunteers then, as were all crewmen of the peacetime fleet, there were numerous impressment riots. Davies notes that "the officers competed to get into the navy with the same zeal with which many seamen sought to get out of it." (p. 230) Despite barbaric punishments without recourse and unremitting delays in pay, the Restoration navy is represented as offering several attractions. Better food was avail-able than for mates aboard merchant fleets or ashore. Improvements in awards, pen-sions, and bounties are noted. Claims that there was little desertion among sailors who were owed more than seven or eight months' wages is dubious evidence of contentment below decks. Davies argues that sailors in the navy were not part of an alienated maritime class, as Marcus Red-iker has recently claimed. Links to officers went beyond their power to appoint petty officers. Commissioned officers were expected to recruit sailors through kin and clients, as well as general reputation.

The stronger half of this book is the detailed study of the politics of the naval officers. Several naval dynasties of kin and neighbours developed into factions in the Restoration navy. Davies consciously builds on Bernard Capp's Cromwell's Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution 1648-1660 (Oxford, 1989), especially in discussing the Restoration itself. A sympathetic treatment of the transition for Vice Admiral John Lawson introduces discussion of an officer corps preoccupied with their pay and their careers. Charles II's honeymoon with his navy lasted until the second Dutch war, and

the intensification of patronage rivalries became particularly acute during the long peace that followed. The best and final chapter is on the revolution of 1688. Rivalries between the factions led by Admirals Arthur Herbert and George Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, are explored in detail. Davies sees the naval conspiracy against James H as a failure without conse-quences for the fortunate revolutionaries. Faction and clientage were more significant in naval politics throughout the Restoration than were the distinctions between gentle-men and tarpaulin officers.

This revised doctoral thesis entirely demolishes the gentlemen vs. tarpaulin myth of the Restoration naval officer corps. While the theme may have constrained the potential for a more thorough social analy-sis, this is a sound guide to the problems and politics of the naval officers serving Charles II and his younger brother.

Ian K. Steele London, Ontario

Hugh Popham. A Damned Cunning Fellow: The Eventful Life of Rear-Admiral Sir Home Popham, KCB, KCH, KM, FRS1762-1820. Tywardreath, Cornwall: The Old Ferry Press, 1991. xiii + 256 pp. maps, photographs, bibliography, index. £2750, cloth; ISBN 0-9516758-0-X.

There seems little doubt that Rear Admiral Popham was indeed a most "cunning fel-low." Originally used by one of the Admir-als' detractors in a pejorative sense, the author succeeds in developing the character of his subject in a more positive way where his cunning is shown in a broader context to illustrate the ingenuity and dexterity of this singularly unique individual.

Orphaned at birth, Popham was fortu-nate to be befriended by Captain Thomson,

Book Reviews 63

who took him to sea at the age of 16, and was to act as father, instructor and protec-tor. From Thomson, he learned seamanship and was introduced to the intricacies of navigation, in which field of endeavour he was to excel. He eventually explored new coastlines and passages wherever his duties took him, including India and the Far East. A master surveyor and excellent hydro-grapher, he continually put forward ideas for improvements in the design of chrono-meters, compasses and binnacles and was to become a fellow of the Royal Society.

But Popham was an adventurer and opportunist and a restless one at that. After eight years at sea, and finding himself ashore on half pay, he sought and received reluctant permission from the Admiralty to go to the East Indies "to follow my private affairs." He spent the next few years in command of merchant ships carrying cargoes both for the East India Company and on his own account. He became a confidante of the Governor General and senior members of the Company Council, though these connections could not save him when his vessel was seized for illicit trading. Prolonged litigation followed and although finally found in his favour, he never recouped his losses.

Not one for self-recriminations, Pop-ham became attached to the Army in Flan-ders under the Duke of York, where he served as Superintendent of Inland Naviga-tion with great distinction and was much involved in combined operations. For his efforts, and on the personal recommenda-tion of the Duke, he was promoted to Post Captain, though he had never commanded a naval vessel larger than a sloop. This hardly commended him to his naval peers.

His agile mind was now to conceive the idea for establishment and organization of the "Sea Fencibles," an anti-invasion force drawn from seamen and fishermen

on the south coast and he personally com-manded the district from Deal to Beachy Head. Back in Ostend he commanded the naval part of the expedition to destroy the sluices of the Bruges Canal and then to Russia to make arrangements for the embarkation of Russian troops for service in Holland. He made such an impression on the Czar that he was invested as a Knight of Malta, an honour to be recog-nized by his own sovereign George III for a "man full of zeal, talent and knowledge."

Next, Popham convoyed troops from the Cape of Good Hope and from India to the Red Sea and cooperated with the Army in Egypt, concluding a communal treaty with the Arabs at Jeddah with his usual skill and zeal. Returning to India his ship underwent extensive repair for which the expenditure was so enormous and extra-ordinary, an investigation was ordered. Once again he was vindicated, the accusa-tions having been grossly exaggerated.

Undaunted by such reverses, Popham had continued his work on his "Telegraphic Signals" or "Marine Vocabulary." This was published in 1800 and became an important adjunct to the Royal Navy's signal book for ships of war; Nelson used it to convey his famous signal at Trafalgar and it formed the basis of naval signalling for many years.

He next hoisted his broad pennant as Commodore and Commander-in-Chief of an expedition against the Cape of Good Hope. Resistance was minimal and he achieved his objective without difficulty. He then heard that Buenos Aires would wel-come liberation by a British force, and he saw this as a patriotic duty and opportunity. At first successful, but soon repulsed, he subsequently faced a court martial for leav-ing his station without orders and received a severe reprimand. None of this seems to have lessened the confidence the Admiralty held for this talented man. He became

64 The Northern Mariner

engaged in an expedition against Copen-hagen in conjunction with Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) and operated as well off the Spanish coast in the Peninsular War. Promoted to Rear Admiral and invested with a Knight Commander of the Bath, he finished his career as Comman-der-in-Chief Jamaica, an appointment he did not hold for long, as he was to retire due to ill health and to die shortly after.

The author has done a considerable service by bringing this extensive biography of a lesser-known admiral of the Royal Navy to our attention. Writing with clarity, he has obviously researched his subject well. One almost feels that perhaps he has some affinity with his distant relation and felt that the story of one man's contribu-tions to naval history in Napoleonic times had been left untold, too long. I believe he is probably right and I can only say that I enjoyed it sufficiently that I shall be seek-ing out other works from the same author.

Robert St. G. Stephens Madingley, Cambridgeshire

Jean Boudriot and Hubert Berti; trans. David H. Roberts. The Bomb Ketch Sala-mandre 1752: Etude navires méditerranéens. Paris: A.N.C.R.E. Société Civile, 1991 [order from Jean Boudriot Publications, Ashley Lodge, Rotherfield, East Sussex TN6 3QX, England.] 144 pp., illustrations, photographs, 34 loose-leaf plates. £75 (+ post & packing, £4 U K , £6 abroad), soft-bound volume and plates in cloth-bound case; ISBN 2-903179-10-7.

Books presenting detailed reconstructions of historic ships are becoming popular with ship modellers and the best of them can be valuable summaries of current knowledge for researchers. The acknowledged leader in this genre is Boudriot's Collection Arché-

ologie Navale Française which now includes twenty-two volumes. Nine have been trans-lated into English, the latest being The Bomb Ketch Salamandre 1752. The centre-piece of the series is The Seventy-Four Gun Ship, which contains general information on the French sailing navy as well as a full description of its large ships. The remain-ing volumes each add specific details of another type, built around a detailed des-cription of one representative ship.

For those familiar with the series, the present volume covers the two-masted, mortar-armed "bombs," invented in 1680 for shore bombardment. These are of interest as the only highly specialized fight-ing vessels of their era. The book includes a short history of them and very brief summaries of various later bombardment types. There are also detailed discussions of mortars and bombs, firing drill, bombard-ment tactics, the uniforms of the Com-panies of Marine Bombardiers, and much else. In short, within the context of the Collection, this volume gives all of the information on the French sailing navy that is specific to shore bombardment.

Readers who have not previously encountered Boudriot's work will find reproductions of much of the contemporary evidence about these craft. The core of the work, however, is the set of 1:48 scale annotated plates that illustrate the Sala-mandre in exquisite detail; more detail indeed than most models could incorporate and almost enough to build a full-scale replica. They cover everything from the lines and sail plans to the type of forelock bolts used in the gun carriages. Scale draw-ings of every frame are included: a great aid to the modeller. There are none of the practical hints that pepper some books of this kind, however; it is a source for those with experience of scratch building not an introduction for beginners.

Book Reviews 65

The work is not without problems. For researchers, Boudriot is too erratic in providing references; archive file numbers are quoted in some places while in others, statements are made which lack any sup-port. The plates necessarily involve much conjecture, which may not trouble modellers (the considered conclusions of the leading expert on these ships being as close to authenticity as can be) but the researcher needs to know which question-able details can be confirmed and which cannot. The text could have benefitted from tight editing; there is too much repeti-tion, some unfortunate ordering of infor-mation and disconcerting shifts between present and past tenses.

In short, this book is highly recom-mended for anyone with a special interest in these vessels and for experienced modellers. Although it could be read alone, prior familiarity with The Seventy-Four Gun Ship would be preferable.

T J. Kenchington Musquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia

Peter Goodwin. The Anatomy of the Ship: The Naval Cutter Alert 1777. London: Con-way Maritime Press, 1991. 126 pp., photo-graphs, drawings, tables, sources. £20, cloth; ISBN 0-89177-592-6.

Peter Goodwin is well known as the author of The Construction and Fitting of the Sailing Man of War 1650-1850 (London, 1987); this, together with his background as a submariner, design engineer, and employee on Victory, establish his creden-tials and his credibility.

This latest book is another in Conway's "Anatomy of the Ship" series. Consistent with other books in the series, The Naval Cutter Alert provides the history of the vessel as well as dimensions, photographs

of a model olHawke in the National Mari-time Museum, lines drawings and plans.

Surprisingly, many people are not all that familiar with cutters and their versatil-ity in the eighteenth century. Inexpensive and somewhat small, they were also quick with a large spread of sail and well-armed, and therefore served as dispatch boats, reconnaissance and patrol vessels, smug-glers and revenue cutters. In 1777 and 1778, the Royal Navy at Dover had fifteen cutters built, one being Alert. In September 1777, she captured the American brig Lexington and captured the French lugger Coureur in June 1778. Alert was subsequently captured in July by the French frigate Junon.

Alert was clinker built, and Goodwin covers the whole range in his research regarding various dimensions, etc. How-ever, there are various cross-references to other cutters for different figures, and this tends to be confusing. Thus, the mast and yard dimensions come from the cutter Pheasant of 1778, while the rigging is from Steel. As there is no known contemporary model extant of Alert, the photos, as previ-ously mentioned, are of Hawke. While some of them are clear and crisp, others are not. The plans and lines drawings are well done, and cover every aspect of this little cutter, including deck furniture, interior details, cannon, and rigging.

On the whole this book is adequate with a few strong points. It would be best, before purchasing it, to try to look through the book unless you have a heavy interest in this period and vessel type. The price is somewhat high for value received, but nonetheless for many of us, it is and will be a worthwhile addition to our libraries.

Bob Cook East Lake Ainslie, Nova Scotia

66 The Northern Mariner

Andrew Lambert. The Last Sailing Battle-fleet: Maintaining Naval Mastery 1815-1850. London: Conway Maritime Press, 1991. x + 214 pp., maps, photographs, tables, drawings, appendix, bibliography, notes, index. £35, cloth; ISBN 0-85177-591-8.

It is an odd phenomenon that the develop-ment of the Royal Navy just prior to the age of steam has been generally neglected and it is hard to understand why. Perhaps the charm of Nelson's ships and the per-ceived perfection at Trafalgar encouraged the conclusion that things simply did not get better, or perhaps the thinking is that steam came onto the scene so suddenly and conclusively that it eclipsed sail overnight, thus rendering the further study of sailing ships dry and inconsequential. Whatever the reasons for this unfair lack of interest, Lambert's latest issue will surely dispel these myths and create new interest in this somewhat overlooked period.

The book's title is a fair description of its subject, yet one must see the table of contents to find the extraordinary range of topics covered. A l l aspects of maintaining and building the Royal Navy during the years between 1815 and 1850 are dealt with here in considerable detail. Lambert begins by describing the taut political and depressed economic climate in Great Brit-ain after the Napoleonic Wars. This virtual-ly dictated strategic naval policy until the Crimean War. Of particular interest are the influences of party politics and the personal idiosyncrasies of the people in government, the Navy Board, the Admiralty and the Surveyor's Office. Also discussed are the progress of technology and subsequent advances in building methods, at a time when the Industrial Revolution and the development of steam power were creating a whole new atmosphere for labour.

Necessarily, new developments in ship

construction and fittings are dealt with at length in the book. Few students of wooden warships have not heard of the innovative structural systems introduced and devel-oped by Seppings and Symonds but very little has been written on the subject. Lambert describes these building tech-niques and discusses their successes and failures. He also describes other moderniz-ing methods, notably that of "razeeing" multi-decked ships (this usually involved the removal of the Upper Deck) so that larger, standardized guns could be carried.

The building of increasingly large ships progressed simultaneously with the devel-opment of heavier ordnance. Lambert dis-cusses this subject as well as the use of foreign species of timber with their accom-panying advantages and drawbacks. The treatments employed to preserve oak against fungal decay (the bane of wooden ships) is also discussed and one wonders if, had not iron replaced wood as the principal building material for warships, an optimum wooden ship would have been built.

The last chapter discusses the develop-ment, maintenance, manning, etc. of the Royal dockyards, the abandonment of pri-vate yards for building navy ships and work in foreign yards, notably in India. This is a welcome follow-up to Morriss' The Royal Dockyards During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Leicester, 1983).

Quite apart from its technical merit, special mention must be made of the book's visual appeal. It is profusely illus-trated with reproductions of draughts, maps, paintings, portraits and models as well as tables. But most remarkable are the contemporary photos of many of the ships, most of which have never before been published. Some of the ships lasted well into the twentieth century, but more impor-tantly, the end of their era (1850) coincides roughly with the introduction of the cam-

Book Reviews 67

era. For the photos alone, simply thumbing through this book piqued my interest.

This is a very thorough and well-con-ceived study; looking at his list of primary sources one can tell that Lambert is break-ing considerable new ground. Some of his conclusions may prove to be controversial. However, as he rightly points out, Mahan's Influence of Sea Power upon History 1660-1805 was seminal; I am sure that The Last Sailing Battlefleet will be as well.

John McKay Langley, British Columbia

James L. Mooney (ed.). Dictionary of Ame-rican Naval Fighting Ships. Volume I, Part A: Historical Sketches-Letter A. Washing-ton, DC: Naval Historical Center, Depart-ment of the Navy, 1991. xxi + 521 pp., maps, photographs, glossary. US $29, cloth.

The US Naval Historical Center has em-barked upon a second generation of its series of historical sketches of US Naval ships. The first volume of that effort is now off the presses. As with the old series, the chronological period covered is 1775 to the present day. The reader is cautioned that the use of the term "fighting ships" within the title may be somewhat misleading as the work deals both in combatant craft and in naval support vessels.

On this second generation go-round, one discovers that histories of vessels whose names begin with the letter "A" cover 580 pages of text as compared against eighty pages of text for the same alphabetical designation within the Naval Historical Center's original product of 1959. Of course a considerable number of ship commissionings have occurred in the interim. This accounts for some of the new material. Considerable information has also been added to the sketches of the vessels

which were enumerated in 1959. Where there is fresh information, it has been gleaned in-house from Navy Historical Center staffing, from the private sector, and from the myriad of published and unpublished operational histories that were written over the past thirty-three years.

The Dictionary has always been a role model in the way it is designed and formu-lated. Now, as in the past, it is far more than just a dry statistical listing of lengths, tonnages, and armaments. Instead, the editors have tried—and with success—to blend the ships biographies with a narrative treatment of the operation(s) in which each ship participated. The risk one can run in doing a list in this manner—particularly a list dealing with so many vessels—is that duplication concerning specific operations can often result in a noticeable redundancy in the writing. This does not appear to have happened here. Instead, each historical sketch is approached as a fresh treatment.

The Dictionary carries many illustra-tions of ships of different types and periods. This debut volume of the new series is clearly an indication of the US Navy's commitment to keep its ship his-tories current. It is highly recommended, both to the researcher and to the casual reader of American naval history.

Charles Dana Gibson Camden, Maine

Chester G. Hearn. Cray Raiders of the Sea: How Eight Confederate Warships Destroyed the Union's High Seas Commerce. Camden, M E : International Marine Publishing, 1991. xv + 351 pp., illustrations, maps, photo-graphs, appendix, index. US $24.95, cloth; ISBN 0-87742-279-6.

With the exception of the ironclad CSS Virginia, which sank two anchored ships in

68 The Northern Mariner

Hampton Roads, the Confederate States Navy did not mount a credible threat against the US Navy. In one of the South's few successful strategies they did, however, nearly drive the commercial fleet from the high seas. In a very compelling history based on meticulous research, the author tells the story of the eight Confederate commerce raiders that captured 247 ships, burning or scuttling 172 of them.

A major theme of this book is that the winner in the war against commercial ships was Great Britain. In 1860, 70% of world trade was carried in American ships. The fear and panic created by the raiders resulted in American ships laying idle in port or being sold or transferred to foreign registry. Great Britain picked up the spoils, winning undisputed dominance of maritime commerce that continued long after 1865.

With or without official complicity, the three most effective raid